Night Street

Night Street

Night Street is the passionate story of a young painter, Clarice Beckett, who defies society’s strict conventions and indifferent art critics alike and leads an intense private and professional life. With her extraordinary talent for making simple city and seascapes haunting and mysteriously revelatory, Clarice paints prolifically and lives largely, overcoming the seemingly confined existence as the spinster daughter in the parental home.Night Street began with Thornell’s first encounter with the paintings of Melbourne artist Clarice Beckett (1887-1935) at the Art Gallery of South Australia. The subtle power of Clarice’s highly atmospheric, enigmatic landscapes enabled her to imagine Clarice’s inner life and shape an extraordinary novel.

Review

by Ann Standish, freelance reviewer

In Night Street, joint winner of the 2009 Vogel Award, Kristel Thornell presents a fictionalised version of the life of painter Clarice Beckett. A student of Frederick McCubbin and then Max Meldrum in the 1920s, Beckett produced hundreds of moody, misty tonal paintings of Melbourne streetscapes and bayside landscapes before her death in 1935. Without a studio of her own, she painted outside at dawn or dusk from the mobile easel she built herself.

Beckett’s life can be seen as bound by the conventions of gender roles and middle-class gentility in interwar Melbourne, but Thornell suggests a more complex story below the surface. She skillfully creates a sense of quiet tension between the unadventurous existence of spinster daughter dutifully caring for aging parents, and the ambition and drive implicit in Beckett’s paintings. The artist’s obvious talent and willingness to experiment rather than follow the paths expected of a woman painter of the era are highlighted, and the controlled sexual passion shown running alongside Beckett’s passion for painting provides further evidence of self-determination.

This is an atmospheric imagining of a woman doing things her own way, on her own terms, despite external constraints.

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